Important SEO Ranking Factors

If you’re trying to optimize your website so that it ranks well online and in Google, you’ll want to make sure you pay attention to some of the most important factors pertaining to Google’s ranking algorithm. Google uses these to help decide which web pages show up first on the search results, so they’re very important in order to be found online.

Authority Backlinks

Google and other search engines pay a lot of attention to links to other websites from trusted sources. These can be citation type websites like Yelp and Yellowpages, or other authorities like news websites, Wikipedia, video sharing platforms, Web 2.0s and more. Generally, the more difficult it is to get a backlink from one of these websites, the more valuable they are. For instance, how many websites get linked to from the ‘New York Times’? If you could get a backlink from them in a news article, that would be sure to help your website rank well on google.

Website Page Content

Ensuring your website ranks well will mean you will have to have a lot of good page content on your site. This means anywhere from 500+ words worth of content on pages you want to rank well. Google and search engines look for more page content as meaning that your website is more informative. While you can get away with less, this always helps and therefore is a good idea if you are trying to improve your rankings. If you’re working with an SEO consultant, they can update your pages to both read well to visitors, while also being well optimized for your keywords and the search engine algorithms.

Social Profiles & Presence

Almost every business these days has a presence on social websites, and to not do so makes your company look illegitimate or out of date. You should definitely have profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and others like Pinterest or Linkedin. Even if you don’t post regularly to these websites, you can have a backlink back to your business that shows that you are a modern business or brand on these websites. A digital marketing agency can provide social media management services which will help you to build up your presence on social media and can actually get a lot of people following you on these websites and checking for updates on your business!

Website Speed

More and more, Google is using website speed as a means to decide how well a website should rank. A slow loading site puts off visitors and causes many people to hit the back button before the website even loads. And, if you’re having to navigate from page to page, this can become extremely onerous if you’re waiting for long periods for the next web page to load. So, for the best search engine results, speeding up your website is an easy improvement to make. You might need to change web hosts or update your plan if you’re stuck on some cheap shared hosting that can’t keep up with your website or visitors. Optimizing the images or video on your site can also make a big improvement, as waiting for images to download can slow down the page rendering. Site speed improvement is one of the SEO services that many SEO companies will offer as part of their packages!